THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 30, 2015
19
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
BASE APPEALS
For twenty years, many people in Israel and in the West
have expressed the hope that Benjamin Netanyahu would
prove to be the Richard Nixon of the State of Israel. Not
the paranoid Nixon of the Watergate scandals or the em-
bittered Nixon raving drunkenly at the White House por-
traits at four in the morning but the Nixon who yearned to
enter the pantheon of statesmen, and who defied his Red-bait-
ing past and initiated diplomatic relations with the People's
Republic of China. Wasn't it possible that Netanyahu, whose
political biography was steeped in the intransigent nation-
alism of the Revisionist movement, was just the right pol-
itician to make a lasting peace with the Palestinians?
It is amazing to recall how long this fantasy persisted.
Even President Obama, whose relationship with Netanyahu
is now poisoned by mistrust, once suspended disbelief.
"There's the famous example of Richard Nixon going to
China," he said, in 2009. "A Democrat couldn't have gone
to China. A liberal couldn't have gone to China. But a big
anti-Communist like Richard Nixon could open that door.
Now, it's conceivable that Prime Minister Netanyahu can
play that same role." Netanyahu, as he went on building
settlements, deftly kept this illusion alive.
In a speech six years ago, at Bar-Ilan Uni-
versity, and in comments as recently as
last year, he spoke of his conditional sup-
port for "two states for two peoples."
In last week's Israeli elections, Net-
anyahu did play the role of Nixon---
except that he did not go to China.
Nor did he go to Ramallah. He went
racist. In 1968, Nixon spoke the coded
language of states' rights and law-
and-order politics in order to heighten
the fears of white voters in the South,
who felt diminished and disempow-
ered by the civil-rights movement and
by the Democrat in the White House,
Lyndon B. Johnson. Nixon's swampy
maneuvers helped defeat the Demo-
crat Hubert Humphrey and secure the
South as an electoral safe haven for more than forty years.
Netanyahu, a student---practically a member---of the
G.O.P., is no beginner at this demagogic game. In 1995,
as the leader of the opposition, he spoke at rallies where
he questioned the Jewishness of Yitzhak Rabin's attempt
to make peace with the Palestinians through the Oslo Ac-
cords. This bit of code was not lost on the ultra-Orthodox
or on the settlers. Netanyahu refused to rein in fanatics
among his supporters who carried signs portraying Rabin
as a Nazi or wearing, à la Arafat, a ka yeh.
Last week, Netanyahu, sensing an electoral threat from
a center-left coalition led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni,
unleashed a campaign finale steeped in nativist fear and
hatred of the Other. This time, there was not a trace of sub-
tlety. "Right-wing rule is in danger," he warned his sup-
porters. "Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls."
On Israeli TV, he said, "If we don't close the gap in the next
few days, Herzog and Livni, supported by Arabs and left-
ist N.G.O.s, will form the next government." (Twenty per
cent of the Israeli citizenry is Arab.) He warned darkly
of "left-wing people from outside," including perfidious
"Scandinavians," and "tens of millions
of dollars" being used to "mobilize the
Arab vote." Pro-Likud phone banks re-
minded voters that Netanyahu's oppo-
nents had the support of "Hussein
Obama."
The day before the election, Net-
anyahu made it clear that, after so many
years of periodically flashing the Nixon-
goes-to-China card to keep the cen-
ter-left and the meddling "foreigners"
at bay, he would play a new hand. "Who-
ever moves to establish a Palestinian
state or intends to withdraw from ter-
ritory is simply yielding territory for
radical Islamic terrorist attacks against
Israel," he said in an interview with
NRG, a right-leaning Israeli news site.
Pressed to say if this meant that he would
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANDY FRIEDMAN